organicARTS: Finding New Ways to Flourish
As part of the Together for Tomorrow’s spotlight on income diversification for community groups to help launch Proper Job’s new how-to guide, we spoke to OrganicARTS in Ide, Exeter about their journey to bring in more funding for their enterprise.
organicARTS is an educational charity that runs, projects, workshops and educational visits with learning with the land at the heart of all we do.
One of these projects is our community garden project which runs twice a week. This project benefits vulnerable adults, although all are welcome, in accessing a meaningful outdoor activity, engaging in all aspects of planting, harvesting and maintaining a large allotment style garden and surrounding fruit bushes, trees and landscape. We have two skilled paid staff that run this project with admin support and also use the support of a small group of volunteers.
The project is mostly funded by grants, which we continuously apply for. Though we do not currently set a fee to access this project we do suggest a sliding scale “donation” £0-£40 a day. We do not wish to financially discriminate, but individuals with an activity budget do contribute. A higher percentage of people cannot.
Our fundraising activities (barn dance, open days, ticketed workshops, etc.) help to contribute towards core costs. To reach 50% is an ideal grants/ income balance but not easily obtained.
Our main challenge is the grant application process. Many small charities are feeling the pinch and many apply for the same pots, so to speak. We are a small team and capacity to constantly apply is limited.
We are exploring the care-farm element as a means to increase income. This would be to make a specific day available for local authority-paid day placements for vulnerable adults.
Other income generation considerations are:
- Local business sponsorships
- Increase income-generating activities: workshops, business away days, corporate paid-for volunteer days (still with capacity challenges)
- Hire of space and collaborative working
- Selling plants is not particularly lucrative – the learning how to is but does carry a core cost
- Crowd funding: we have successfully done this before, which helped contribute towards restoration of our creative studio
- Big Give, we do this over Christmas
Truth be known we are struggling, but organicARTS has weathered the storm before and will continue, having already 22 years under its belt!
Curious about how to make more money for your community group?
Check out Proper Job’s Income Diversification Toolkit here.
